Sex Hormones May Sway Women's Career Choices

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Whether a girl grows up to be a firefighter, a scientist, an
artist or a teacher may have its roots in the hormones she was
exposed to as a fetus.

A new study of 125 individuals discovered that females exposed to
high rates of a male hormone in their mother's uterus are more
likely than other females to later be interested in jobs
normally preferred by males, such as engineer or pilot.

A team of psychologists at Pennsylvania State University looked
at the career interests of young men and women with congenital
adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a genetic condition in which the body
produces high levels of
the male hormone androgen. Although they are exposed to
androgen while developing, females with CAH are genetically
female and reared as females. Their career interests, however,
tended to match those shown by males, both with and without CAH.
They were less interested in jobs like social worker and teacher
than other females. [ See
jobs chosen by women with and without CAH ]

"We took advantage of a natural experiment," said study
researcher Sheri Berenbaum, a psychologist at Penn State
University.

People or Things

Berenbaum and her colleagues asked each participant, whose ages
ranged from 9 to 26, to rank 64 jobs based on their like, dislike
or indifference to. There were clear differences in how each
group of participants — females and males with or without CAH —
ranked certain jobs and types of jobs.

When the researchers grouped the jobs on a scale of whether they
involved working more with people, such as a nurse or teacher, or
working more with inanimate things, like a carpenter or chemist,
the association became clear. Females with CAH, and males in both
groups, expressed more interest in jobs working with things,
whereas females without CAH preferred jobs working with people.

Even those not affected by CAH are exposed to varying levels of
hormones during development, and previous studies have shown that
this
influences childhood behaviors, such as toy preferences. CAH
is one extreme of the variance in hormones, but the trend seen in
the new research likely holds true in the broader population,
Berenbaum said.

The explanation for how hormones influence behavior all comes
back to the brain. "The brain has to be mediating this," said
Adriene Beltz, a Penn State graduate student who worked with
Berenbaum on the research. "But that's something that's not easy
to look at." New brain-scanning technologies, she said, will
start to reveal the whole story.

The new research, which appears in the September 2011 issue of
the journal Hormones and Behavior, looked at the career interests
of relatively young individuals. Next, Berenbaum and Beltz are
looking at an older population and testing whether the pattern
holds true for actual career choices.